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Snail Mail’s Retreat in Canada

With the digital handwriting ever clearer on the wall, the Canadian postal service has announced that it will end its remaining door-to-door letter deliveries over the next five years and focus on its one clear growth area: package deliveries to a public that is increasingly doing its shopping online.

The changes, which include hefty jumps in the cost of stamps, provoked widespread opposition, judging by recent polls. But officials wrestling with rising pension costs and fading revenues said that curtailing deliveries was unavoidable given the world’s rapid evolution toward instant electronic communication.

“If the mail is changing its shape and size, don’t we think the mailbox should change its shape and size, too?” Deepak Chopra, the chief executive of Canada Post, argued. Doorstop delivery would be replaced mainly by community, apartment lobby or rural mailboxes already used by two-thirds of the nation’s 15.1 million addresses.

But the end of home delivery to the remaining five million urban addresses ends a tradition that extends back to the opening of a post office in Halifax in 1753. Over the years, Canadians have found the service increasingly balky and outdated, filled with junk mail and chronic deliverers’ strikes — “the most incompetent monopoly on the planet,” is the way one columnist put it while fulminating over the service’s modernization plans.

The service plans up to 8,000 job cuts to deal with future declines in revenues, reflecting global trends. According to The Economist magazine, the volume of the world’s posted letters has been dropping by better than 4 percent per year. The United States Postal Service has suggested modest reforms, including ending Saturday deliveries, an instant point of political contention. Other countries are trying out various reforms. The ray of hope in all of them is the Internet’s upside: the rise in package deliveries, an 11 percent increase last year in Canada.

A version of this editorial appears in print on December 24, 2013, in The International New York Times. Today's Paper|Subscribe